Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday August 24, 2010 @03:39AM
from the taking-the-first-m-out-of-mmorpg dept.

Atari and Cryptic Studios are teaming up to make a new Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG called Neverwinter, planned for Q4 2011. Gameplay will center on five-person groups that can include other players and/or AI allies, and there will be an extensive content generation system. Gamespot spoke with Cryptic CEO Jack Emmert, who explained parts of the game in more depth:
"I think there are two very unique gameplay elements in 4th Edition that we've done something interesting with: action points and healing surges. In the tabletop game, an action point lets a player perform a reroll or add an additional die to a roll. In our game, action points are earned through combat and spent to power special abilities called 'boons.' These boons give players special boosts, but only in certain circumstances. Healing surges represent the amount of times a player can heal himself before resting. In D&D and Neverwinter, various abilities let players use a surge immediately or perhaps replenish the number of surges available. It's a precious resource that players will need to husband as they adventure in the brave new world. Positioning, flanking, tactics, and using powers with your teammates are also all things that come from the 4th Edition that are interesting. Of course, we're using power names and trying to keep power behavior consistent with the pen-and-paper counterparts. Neverwinter will definitely feel familiar to anyone who has played the 4th Edition."

Same advancement tree for everyone... content-free books... no non-combat skills... made for raiding... no risk to die, at all, ever... healing surges are like a zillion reserve HP... second wind, half-health? poof! full health!... every class plays the same way... no longer D&D... playing a bard makes you crazy... so much less versatility...

Well, we're talking about 4th Edition here, and I doubt that the game under discussion will have a "Use 2nd edition plus house rules" mode, so your crusty old reminiscences are about as relevant as elves-as-a-character-class - when y'all played D&D the first time it was called D&D, you get to yell at kobolds to get off your lawn.

That being said, I have seen nothing good at all about the 4th edition, and frankly no, it's not really D&D anymore other than the name. IMNSHO

The great things about 4E are:

1) It's extremely DM friendly, especially for making up adventures on the fly. To crunch out the stats for a fight that would be interesting and challenging to veteran 3/3.5E players would easily take an hour. 1/2E didn't have that level of complexity, but it was really easy to guess wrong about how tough a fight would be. (And sure, you could fudge it from there if you wanted -- *rolls behind the screen* "Damn, the terrasque rolled all 1s... again." but that's not particularly fun for anyone.) 4E makes it ridiculously easy to throw together an encounter on the spur of the moment that's actually interesting and balanced.

2) It's actually pretty balanced. Earlier editions are fundamentally imbalanced even with just the basic books. For example, in 2E, dual classed humans are ridiculously more powerful than any other kind of character you could make. In 3E, wizard/cleric/druid are ridiculously more powerful than any other kind of character you could make. (People like to say that those caster classes were weak at first and grew strong over time, but as your players have a stronger grasp of the game, the level where the pure casters are equal to anyone else gets lower and lower. By the time we stopped playing 3E, it was about level 3.)

And sure, you can just sort of agree amongst the players that you're not going to play anything especially powerful, but how fun is that? I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, we're not going to pick one level each of 10 different prestige classes from 8 different books, but how fun is it to say, no one can play a spellcaster?

People sometimes turn that criticism into a strawman that I think D&D is about building the strongest character you can and how that's not the way the game's not meant to played. And that's true, it's not -- it's a team game. Team games are fun if everyone in terms of character strengths has something to contribute. It's not fun to be the 3.5E fighter in a party with a 3.5E cleric, who's a much better fighter than you and can cast a ton of spells. (On the other hand, you can have a lot of fun with 2E/3E/etc. until the point when the players start figuring these things out.)

The bad thing about 4E is this:

Sadly, it turns out that a rigorously balanced version of D&D isn't all that much fun to play if you're used to previous editions. Balance is achieved by making each character class fairly similar in, not every way, but a lot of ways.

Additionally, the non-combat abilities of your character are drastically reduced. In a sense, this was necessary, because again, who wants to play a fighter (who has basically nothing other than a couple skills maybe to contribute mechanically outside of a fight) when there's the druid who's not only a much better combat character but also has 100 creative things he can do outside of combat.

I have to disagree with just about everything you've said here... with the exception of 4th ed being not much fun.

1) It's a drag for DM's because you can't do anything with the system but frustrate the players. Monster powers are arbitrary and often completely out of line with their challenge ratings, and there was often no logical or systematic reason for what monsters could do. At the same time, you couldn't actually tell an epic fantasy story in it because the high level free form magic was all gone, so

2) Wizards have not ruled the game since 2nd ed, and clerics have never been other than a support class. Druids still kick ass, but everyone gets their moment to shine. Are you sure you played 3.5? A cleric who spends five full rounds buffing himself can be a mediocre fighter, but still can't beat a fighter two levels lower than he is (we put this to the test.) But a similar range of buffs on the tank can turn him into a Dragon slaying god. Spellcasters are good at taking out hordes of grunts, but for bosses, there's no saving throw against a good axe.

With all due respect, your players are not very good at playing spellcasters. (You should be happy about this -- seriously, their incompetence makes the game more fun than it actually is.) Hell, if your clerics are even wasting rounds buffing they're not very good. One round of buffing (usually while closing in anyway) is pretty standard at the low-mid levels but that phase doesn't last very long, level-wise. You fix the buffing problem in a number of ways -- for example, spells that last either all day or plenty long to clear a dungeon or whatever, possibly with extend spell to turn hour/level durations into 'all damn day', quicken spell to get short-turn combat buffs out fast. Pearls of power allow throwing the 10 minutes/level spells like barkskin (plant domain as one example -- there's good stuff for other domains as well, of course) as many times as you need to. Bead of karma and other casting-level mods to jack up the casting level of buffs, increasing their bonuses, increasing their duration, and making them harder to dispel.

It only even matters so much what items you even choose to let the players have because of craft wonderous item.

That's all out of the core PHB/DMG. If you allow other books into play, it gets even worse fast. Divine metamagic is probably the most broken feat in the whole edition and drastically increases the cleric's ability to throw out big buff spells or combat spells while full attacking. Divine spell power makes the aforementioned casting level problem worse. Sudden metamagic feats make all of the above worse.

A fighter is a better fighter than a cleric at very low levels. Get into the midlevels and it's over -- if your cleric gets into any fight without about 10 buff spells already up, he is doing something seriously wrong. Get into the high levels (16ish) and throwing out 500 melee damage in a round as a cleric with no combat feats, no magical weapons or especially combat-focused magic items, and a 10 strength is very possible with no prep time (outside of spells that last literally a day or longer.)

I give you, the fighter always has feats on the cleric -- but that's about it. Divine power fixes the base attack deficit, and that's out at level 7. Past that point, it's not very satisfying to be the fighter when the cleric puts out twice the melee damage you do AND has the full wack of cleric things to do.

1) If a 3/3.5 druid is not the toughest character at the table at level 1, he is doing something wrong. It will just get worse from there. By level 7, the druid, played competently, is tougher than the other 5 guys in the party put together. The game devolves to watching the druid do everything.

A genuinely well-played druid is even worse. I've seen a ~ level 10 druid (this is in regulation/tournament play -- no weird house rules in play, etc.) respond to the appearance of a pit f

Okay, you were obviously playing a completely different game. You should have probably dropped your house rules.

Metamagic feats only double the duration of spells, not make them last all day long. Divine Power and Righteous Might last one round per level. Unextended, this might last two fights. Extended, four fights... in both cases, if you're very lucky and the doors between them aren't locked, and you just keep running without searching, looting, or trap checking (just one trap can stymie the overzealous

Okay, you were obviously playing a completely different game. You should have probably dropped your house rules.

Nope. I'm talking about core rule play. Most (but not all) of my 3/3.5E play was WotC-sanctioned convention / organized play -- Living Greyhawk, stuff like that. Because of the WotC involvement, these campaigns are typically constrained very closely to the rules as written -- I've never seen a home game that did not change more of the rules than LG did. Rule changes were limited to things like

The difference, I think, is that you allow everything to stack--Magic Weapon and Magic Vestment add to a weapon's bonuses, rather than just top them up to a maximum, players can have and use endless Pearls of Power, etc. It's actually fairly easy to make the problem go away--don't allow essentially duplicate powers to stack. If two powers do the same thing by the same method, you just take the better one. So if you have +2 armor, and the 12th level cleric casts Magic

You're correct, the bonuses don't stack. If you cast magic vestment (+5) on +1 plate mail you end up with (temporarily) +5 plate mail, not +6 plate mail.

But you don't actually need them to:

1) Being able to skip having pluses on weapons/armor frees you up to dedicate resources elsewhere. For example, you're crafting wonderous items instead of magic arms and armor. Instead of being excited that you found +2 full plate you're trying to sell or barter it for just about anything else.

You're saying that is if it's a good thing. For role playing, it isn't.The challenge is to work with the lack of balance, protect the weaknesses and capitalize on any strengths, and really live the character and do the best with what you have -- especially when it's not fair.The 18/92 barbarian really is overly strong, and it's up to the 13 strength fighter to find a way to bring him down, through teamwork, outwitting him, making the story so good that even the gods get moved,

But it's not fun to be the 13 strength fighter at the table with the 18/92 strength guy week after week, having to work twice as hard to contribute half as much.

My point is that the various things a player can play are relatively balanced against each other in 4E -- they each have strong points and different things to contribute, but all around they're roughly "as good" as each other. That's not the case in previous editions -- there are always some player options, even in the core rules, that are much, mu

I've been on both sides of this (being useless in combat and being the top damage) and I would rather be in a rag tag party of misfits and having fun any day of the week. As long as it is fun and the story is good who cares about balance, I play pen and paper RPGs to get away from that kind of drama.

If no one really knows what the rules are or is taking the mechanics of the game seriously, pretty much any RPG set of rules or lack thereof is fine.

Personally, I spent a lot of the 3E/3.5E era going to gaming conventions, or playing home games with people who were also of that crowd. That kind of environment is a serious crucible for any rules set for a few reasons.

First, because mechanically, adventures are written to standard and at least some significant

You make some good points. I never tried to speak for everyone with my opinions certainly and I will admit that I play with some people who feel that balance is important to a fun play experience.

All I'm saying is that there is a point at which you stop playing and start rules lawyering and that an overwhelming focus on balance at an ability by ability level leads to generic boring game play (a major complaint with 4e and for that matter many MMORPGs). As long as everyone realizes that it's about having fu

If you think that there's no risk of dying in 4th edition then you haven't played it. Healing surges heal you by a 1/4 your max hit points, not to full health, and you only get one second wind per encounter. Any additional healing must come from a healing surge activated by a power. Your total healing is limited to not just the number of healing spells possessed by the healer, but is also limited by your daily surges.

The classes do not play the same. The powers and class features are varied and two characte

On the other hand, 3rd ed was about "How much jerky did you bring when you went on this hike?", "Well, that's not enough jerky".

I figured 'daily rations' were simple enough to calculate.-

I dunno, I found the 4E documentation to be in a worse state than the 3E - they tried to make it more appealing to more people, and they kinda ruined its appeal. There are some rules which are just plain wierd (Astral Diamonds???), and the LIST of 'artifacts' or whatever in the player documentation is just a nono. And they removed druids - I'll never forgive them for that.

I'll forgive the Elves. And over look the Dragonborn. But if I want to play-by-the-book D&D as I've done for years, I can't play my goddamned drunkard Gnome fighter. And that irks me...

On a somewhat more serious note, it's a hell of a lot easier stream-lining rules in 3rd than it is in 4th simply because of all the clunky rules that have been added. They did a good job getting rid of the roleplay, though. Which I guess is incentive to play 4th if that's what you're looking for.

Roleplay isn't something you can really put in or take out of the rules. Whether you get roleplay or not depends more on the group you're playing with. For example, one of the (4e) encounters I set up for a group recently went something like this:Party is doing the usual killing thing in a ruined keep, and finds a note in a chest revealing that someone is to meet with a cultist that night to hand over an artifact (elsewhere in the ruins was an excavation, down into a room below that was now empty. Hint hint.).They decide that the best way to proceed is to make a fake artifact (not knowing what it looks like didn't stop them), go to the meeting, and try to get some more information out of the cultist guy. They even try to get the reward for handing over their fake, but narrowly avoid being stabbed instead. Then they tie the cultist guy up, borrow his cloak and pretend to be him when the guy with the real artifact comes.

They could have handled it several other ways, including attacking him to get the artifact, or following him back after he gets the artifact and stealing it, etc. but they chose the roleplaying route and it worked out amazingly well for them. The fact that it was 4e wasn't a barrier to the roleplaying at all, despite what people say about d&d having been made into a hack&slash.

Most of the time my party defined insanity in finding solutions. I recall one "boss" that we tried to avoid peacefully, and the resulting situation involved his horde of minions singing him Happy Birthday as he chased us out of his palace with a rather large hammer.

This is why I quit playing pen and paper RPGs. I had a series of awesome groups (meaning inventive, and somewhat strange), and then we all got old, moved, and generally have very rare opportunities to see each other in person, much less have a decent game. Later I tried some other groups, and they were generally completely serious about it, and never went for strange solutions just to see what happens and/or piss of the DM. It was very much like playing WoW, more of a fantasy combat simulator than a role

Roleplay isn't something you can really put in or take out of the rules.

White Wolf's Exalted handles this really, really well. For any action, you can try to get "stunt dice": basically, you describe what you are doing in a cool way and if it sounds creative, you get extra dice to roll.

So, instead of, "I attack with my sword," you say, "I lunge over the table, uttering a blood-curdling war cry, and slash mightily at his mid-section."

Even more extra dice if you cause the entire group of players to either laugh or gasp in amazement. It does a great job of keeping the players

And you don't have to look at a dragonborn and think "well they're only good for being a stupid fighter type", the classic "race that can only really be one class". I played a dragonborn wizard for a while, a character who could do as much damage hitting someone with his staff as he could with most of his spells. At one point he was chained up, and escaped by breaking the chains holding him through a sheer feat of strength. Not many wizards can claim to have done that XD

Equally good at everything, but not equal to other adventurers of the same level. He probably lacks quite a few stats and maybe a level or two because of his choice of race, but he has some cool gimmicks from being physically strong.

He absolutely sucked at a lot of non-combat skills, his AC wasn't great (wizard, can't use metal armour, though thick dragonborn skin helped) and combat wise he was much better used against swarms of minions than against stronger individual enemies (typical wizard). When I say hitting with his staff was as strong as most of his spells, that's ignoring the range and area effects on the spells, and I should be clear that hitting with his staff comes nowhere

Agreed. I always like trying different combinations that may not be best suited for each other. For the last campaign I was in I rolled a minotaur bard - the DM normally doesn't allow monster classes but he made an exception since it wasn't a typical combination. The roleplay element alone made the character more than worth it.

On the other hand, 3rd ed was about "How much jerky did you bring when you went on this hike?", "Well, that's not enough jerky".
4th Ed is the first one I can play with my friends where we spend more time playing than looking in damn books. Also, if you don't like Eladrin (basically High Elves) or Dragonborn, don't play them.

That damnable old school D&D forcing people to read and remember things written in books! How very dare they!

P.S. you could have taken your own advice with regard to ration rules if they annoyed you so much -- don't use them.

Ration rules were just an example. 4th Ed is streamlined in such a way that we're actually playing the game more than we are looking up rules. It's not about having to read, I've read it. It's about being tied up in details everytime something remotely unordinary props up.

Sure, 4th ed has its faults, but at least its a lot easier for new guys like my group to pick up and, you know, play.

Ration rules were just an example. 4th Ed is streamlined in such a way that we're actually playing the game more than we are looking up rules. It's not about having to read, I've read it. It's about being tied up in details everytime something remotely unordinary props up.

More time looking up rules than playing? Never had that experience. Sure, things have popped up from time to time that required a minute or two leafing through a text, but more time doing that than playing? -- has never happened to me.

4E is the first one I could read since AD&D. 3/3.5 should go into the design and readability hall of shame. That said, most of the gripes I hear about 4E are similar to the gripes I heard when 3 came out.

They made the game hoping to expand the range of people who would play the game. Personally, the split class, split race, items and skills picked from a dozen different expansions mentality of the 3rd ed groups I met meant I'd beat myself to death with my own arm before playing. I have however had a great time playing, then DMing in 4th. None of the people I played with were 'veteran' roleplayers, and half hadn't roleplayed before. Finally, I can't stand WoW,

Unfortunately the character from multiple splats is back. With 3 PHBs, 3 Martial Powers, Arcane, Divine, two race books and several others we're back to the problem I had with 3 and 3.5. Oh well, 4.5 is out next month, so we can start the treadmill again.

I wish I could work up much interest in this announcement, but to be honest, I'm finding it hard.

What is it with everybody going for a multiplayer focus these days? I mean, sure, I've no objection to having a co-operative mode in the game (indeed it's a positive boon), but I'm getting sick to death of games where the singleplayer campaign is rendered unnecessarily hard or boring due to pandering to co-op. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is probably the most recent example (there are sections which are a nightmare on any difficulty if you're on your own), but it's just one of many.

Once upon a time, I'd have been more positive, I guess. Back when I was a student, or newly started working (and still relatively junior, at the point where I was working fairly sensible hours), myself and a bunch of friends would routinely play online co-op. But even then, it wasn't that easy, for a game that demanded a substantial number of people and a good chunk of time. I remember a theoretically 6-player co-op run we did through Baldur's Gate 2 and its expansion, where in reality, after the first session or two, we never seemed to have more than 3 or 4 people in-game at any one time (which BG2 was thankfully very good at adjusting for). We ended up running the first NWN with a 3 person party (as NWN was much less resilient if your group was missing a player) and felt like we were missing out on a lot, since you couldn't really get a properly balanced party with just 3 people. These days, after going through a MMORPG phase (which does help with the problem somewhat by increasing the pool of available players, at the expense of basically needing to devote 30+ hours a week to it to play sensibly) we just don't seem to bother. With the people I actually know and like well enough to want to play online regularly with all in the same situation as myself, working jobs with substantial degrees of responsibility and erratic hours, getting people together on any kind of schedule is just too difficult. Co-op gaming for me has basically come down to the odd Gears of War mission on a Sunday afternoon.

Maybe it's just me being a Grumpy Old Man (TM). Maybe there is a huge market out there for games where the developers have cut loads of corners and justified it by saying "but it's multiplayer focussed". Oh well, at least Bioware still seem to be on my side (now when's Dragon Age 2 out?).

See, I was going to pre-order Dragon Age, but I put it back on the shelf when I saw it wasn't multiplayer. I have a stack of single player games waiting for me to finish. I want something to play with my wife, not something to sit alone and play by myself.

What happened to the days when all you needed were three books, (The DM's guide, player's handbook, and monster manual) and some imagination to play DnD? I'm not ever from that generation but I can see how v4 has taken all the creativity and original thought out of DnD. Instead of think up scenarios, worlds, and campaings for players. All DM's have to do is roll dice until their twenty-some books have told them what to say. The massive amounts of rules don't add to the gameplay, they just limit what you can do both as a DM and a character. I used to run v1 campaigns and can't do it anymore because any new players I get, (and most of them are older than me since I was born in 1993) can't understand its simplicity. I hope that at some point people will get fed up with having to keep track of tons of little things just to keep their character alive and go back to just making sure you had enough hit points kill the dragon before it cooked you and ate you for lunch.

Well I do have the 3 books of 4e and I don't think there's anything else that's necessary to have fun. Just ask my kids. Now of course considering that it's human nature to want more, people will flock to the additions and newest stuff that comes with more rules. But you really don't need it, and as you said in many ways just having HP, AC, To Hit and a couple of spells is more than enough to have a lot of fun with a well crafted story.

Nothing is overpowered when you're playing against a live DM whose intelligence and creativity are on par with the player.

If I had mod points you'd get them all. Though I admit I prefer when the DM can outsmart the players.

Our former DM (fake trap guy I mentioned earlier) outsmarted one of our party in a way I will never forget. One of our members ended up with a monkey's paw with one wish left on it so he spent days crafting his wish to allow for any countereffects the DM would add. The gist of the wish was that he wanted to be able to cast meteor shower simply by saying "meteor shower". It took him several minutes to rec

When he finished the DM granted the wish with two caveats: he was compelled to respond when anyone asked him a question and the only words the player was able to speak were "meteor shower".

That's really evil:) But I can think of a number of other "solutions" to this conundrum, least of which, assuming friendly fire on the meteor shower, the position of the meteor shower being.... centered around the player maybe?

I hate to tell you this, but I have well over 50 books for AD&D 2nd Edition, and there are at least as many in 1st Edition.

There have ALWAYS been a zillion supplements for D&D/AD&D. It's how the publisher makes money. They make more books. If all they sold were the PHB, Monster Manual, and DMG no one would ever need more than those three volumes.

There have _always_ been published adventures, campaign settings, and more optional rules than you can shake a quarterstaff at. At least with 3.5e/4e th

For 4e I use the 3 core books, and the adventurer's vault for magic item ideas (the core books are a bit lacking on this). I got the first campaign (keep on the shadowfell, before the 4e core books were released?), but we never finished it. It's so much more satisfying to play a free-flowing campaign that the DM makes up, than a pre-written one.

What would be really nice though, for when I run a minatures-based game, would be being able to buy a pack of e.g. "10 zombies", instead of those damn random packs.

I don't think 4E is exactly more complicated than 1E. In many ways it's a throwback. It's more that the complexity is in different areas.

For example:

1E fighter is a lot easier to play than 4E fighter, but 4E wizard is a lot simpler to play than 1E magic user.

Look at the 1E hit charts (weapon type vs. AC) and tell me that mechanic isn't ridiculously complicated compared to every other edition. "Okay, I swing at the orc with my whip, and with this roll I can hit AC 10, 8, and 7 but not AC 9 or 6 or lower."

I call B.S. I grew up with 1st edition. 4th has countless modifiers to every aspect.

It wouldn't be a new edition if it was the same...

Another ridiculous characteristic is a large number of "powers" for melee classes. Give me a break. I look at my wizard, and see my daughter's Ranger has a similar number of powers. It's garbage.

This is intentional. Spellcasters don't need to sleep after every encounter to recharge spells any more, weapon-focussed classes now have some choice about what they do each turn (instead of "I attack the closest guy" "I attack the closest guy again" "I attack again" "again" "again" "again"... "ok bored now"). It's a massive improvement. I'll grant you that some of the "powers" for melee classes are a bit dodgy, smelling suspiciously like magic, but mostly t

I like the way the combat system works for magic, as it alleviates the players trying a fight/rest/fight/rest type of dungeon crawl. Outside of that I much preferred 3.5. I was thinking of trying a hybrid campaign where we used the 3.5 rules for everything except magic, which would use the 4th ed turn/combat/daily magic use.

Look at the Reserve Feats in Complete Mage if you want a 3.5 Wizard/Sorcerer with some more staying power. Gives you at-will abilities based on the spells you have memorized with the power of the ability determined by the level of the spell. For instance, a fire based attack that does 1d6 damage per level of the highest level fire spell you have memorized.

Otherwise I'd suggest Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords, which is where they essentially prototyped the 4th edition rules in 3.5. Fair warning, though,

OD&D - The perfect dungeon based roleplaying game, with dungeons. Just where the hell can I buy Chainmail?!
BD&D - Pandering to the Rogue-like crowd. Also, when my DM's in a bad mood with me and make up biased rules.
AD&D - Pandering to the Dungeon Master crowd. Also, can we not start at 5th level and I play a Wizard? With psionics?
2D&D - Pandering to Diablo crowd. Also, whoo, this all tastes a little Vanilla.
3D&D - Pandering to the Ultima Online crowd. Also, while I've spent 40 hour

Wasn't elf/halfling/dwarf as a class in the original D&D, as opposed to the Advanced rules? The original D&D came as boxes with softcover books, while the AD&D rules were hardbound. Then between 1 and 2ed AD&D, another release of the D&D rules came out that split things up into basic (levels 1-3), intermediate (4-6), etc.

The way to tell the difference between D&D and AD&D was alignment. If someone was lawful, that was D&D. If they were lawful-good, or chaotic-neutral, tha

What you're referring to as BD&D, if you mean the Basic through Immortals boxed sets (or the Rules Cyclopedia compilation + Wrath of the Immortals) catered to those who preferred High Fantasy High Magic Worlds with balanced high-level play.

It's the only variant that included mass-combat and dominion rules in the main ruleset. It's also the only variant with a world that's understandable and accesible to players because Mystaran cultures are based on ones in our history. Unlike say Greyhawk which had

4th Edition killed my interest in D&D. It's a shame that I will apparently never have a new D&D computer game to play ever again, but I'm sticking with 1st-3rd Editions and Pathfinder which feels far more D&D than 4e ever will.

Forgotten Realms was one of my favorite fictional settings, but 4e killed that too, with the Spellplague and jump forward in time and everything, so again, 4e ruined not only D&D but also the Forgotten Realms.

Furthermore, Cryptic is one of my least favorite developers. They make very simplistic games that are all about combat mechanics and hack and slash, with no good story or intriguing characters anywhere in sight.

This is a strong pass. I'd *love* a good Forgotten Realms D&D game, but this provides for none of that. "good" is negated by Cryptic, "Forgotten Realms" is negated by 4e, and "D&D" is negated by 4e.

You sound bitter. You didn't even give reasons why 4e killed your interest (other than some Forgotten Realms lore). For what it's worth 4e is a lot more fun to play than it is to read about so if you've never actually played you might be missing out on some fun times. You won't really know if you'll like the games or not unless you play them. Even if you don't like 4e table top RPG you might unexpectedly like the CRPG. Who knows? But either way I'd advise against pre-judging.

Because it isn't up to debate. If I started listing reasons why 4e killed my interest, all it would do is invite people to argue with each point, and say, "no, this was a *good* change", when none of it would make the game any less dead to me. You can't argue me into liking 4e by arguing each of the points why I dislike it. Hence, listing those points is a waste of time.

It feels more like a company deciding to exploit the stubbornness of a group of D&D players by pandering to their tendencies to resist change, which I suppose could be considered as just like T$R with its shameless grab for money under the mask of serving the playerbase.

I dunno. I liked the move from 2nd to 3rd (though I still have a special place in my heart for 2nd and recently started buying some books to rerun I6: Ravenloft this Halloween). And I really liked the move from 3rd to 3.5. To me, 2nd-

This is all really light on details, but Neverwinter Nights had a dungeon master client, a level generator, etc. None of that here, so I'm guessing we're looking at a Guild Wars clone based on the 4e ruleset?

I see a lot of the comments are taking sides on which rules edition is best and that's fine and to be expected. Problem is, the biggest issue on this is not that they're using the 4e rule set, but that they handed yet another beloved property to Cryptic. Y'know, the guys who took the Star Trek MMO license and took a big steamy dump on it. The guys who took their Champions Online engine and skinned it Star Trek then called it a days work. The company who innovated on how to nickel and dime their player base and laughed from their pile of money conned from a bunch of Trek fans. The company that promised Atari that it could publish a new MMO every year so they could rake in the cash.

Yeah, this isn't Bioware doing Neverwinter Nights as an MMO, this is just Cryptic preparing to kick yet another nerd group right in the balls. My bet is that their precious "character customization" selling point, which they mention in every goddamn fluff piece from their marketing department is the same thing from when they were involved with City of Heroes/Villians which really amounts to your various options on a slider bar. Bah, I'm never giving Cryptic another damn dime. Gaming is better off if this company goes broke and folds.

It sounds as if they're not going to fix the biggest problem with Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2: that they were not turn-based.

Neverwinter Nights 1 was a really good game, surprisingly faithful to tabletop D&D. The modmaking community produced a lot of modules that were adaptations of classic tabletop D&D modules. There were a number of minor deviations from the tabletop rules, but the most serious deviation was that NWN 1 was not turn-based. Neverwinter Nights 2 worsened the problem.

I meant to do something with the idea of the pit being illusionary. Or the spikes. I'm not saying the players wouldn't die, just that it wouldn't be straightforward:)

We had a DM that loved fake traps. His best was a room where the ceiling was coming down towards the party, the door slammed shut behind us and wouldn't open, and there was a button next to it on the wall. Every time the button was pushed the ceiling would reset and start coming down again. It took about an hour and a half for everyone to figure out the solution. Turns out there was an invisible ledge with a pressure-sensitive switch that opened the door; the ceiling came to rest on it just outside everyone's reach. Every time someone hit the button they delayed getting out of the room.

Extra standard action, which can be substituted for a move or minor action as per the usual rules. Though you normally get some other effect with it, like temporary health, and some abilities allow for spending them to cause other effects (IIRC).

I tend to play without them, because people always forget about them anyway, and it's hard to explain exactly what they're supposed to be.

Indeed, the action points they describe are pretty much identical to the original action points introduced in 3rd edition's Eberron (or possibly Unearthed Arcana? Whichever came first...). I don't recall them officially allowing you to reroll, but they were definitely used to add +1d6 to any roll (after you make the roll but before the DM tells you the results).

If true, this one's the really big deal - it's what made NWN stand out originally. Its singleplayer was only so-so, but the ability for a relative newbie to easily create your own worlds and then DM a party (or just a bunch of randomly wandering players) in them was what made the game worthwhile.

I didn't know Neverwinter Nights even had single player. Oh wait. You mean the remake of NWN from Bioware? I don't know why everyone has so little imagination that they have to keep reusing the same name. It doesn't bode well for the games themselves.

What made NWN 1 a game where I bought multiple copies of (one per computer) were seven things:

1: The DRM or lack thereof. The CD protection got patched out, and a valid and unique CD key was needed to play multiplayer. This by itself made the game worth installing and buying multiple copies of, because they actually considered gamers as (WTF) paying customers, and not potential thieves. What a concept that is unheard of these days. I use NWN1's implementation of DRM and its exceedingly low piracy stati

Try Pathfinder, it's basically what 4th should have been.The classes maintain their flavor while gaining options.They streamlined what needed it (NOTE streamlined what was needed. NOT made stupidly dumb everything)http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG [paizo.com]95%+ compatible with 3.5
I've been playing since 1982 and pathfinder is the best version of AD&D I've seen yet, not perfect, but it's never been perfect.
AD&D has a cycle to it, version, add on rules till it gets to be a mess to track them, then new version, lather rinse repeat. But it's still a lot of fun.

I completely agree and really wish I had mod points to add to this. While I have a few balance gripes with anything d20 related, any tabletop RPG will inevitably have one thing that is 'better' than another in most situations. And when you really start to play a game with a competent GM and group of people you can call 'friends', balance should be maintained through social contract. Not through rules so simple that they cripple a character's ability to be unique.

Are your gripes related to the PDF of a d20? I liked rolling three d6 etc. The combination was decently close to a normal distribution which seems more realistic. And realism in simulating my attacks on gazebos is important to me.

4e may copy the feel of WoW, but it's Magic: The Gathering at it's heart. As a foundation for a computer game it's a hopeless joke. Over a third of the powers in the game "interrupt" another power. That's great for a table top game, but every one of them will have to be rewritten for a computer game in real time. By the time they are done with it they're going to have a new system in place entirely.

I was thinking the same thing, but adding a couple things as well, other than sprucing the graphic tiles up:

1: Ability to have a central character server and area servers. This way, a PW could be spread out on multiple machines, each serving up a lot of areas. This sort of can be done, but it essentially means exporting the characters to another PW, as opposed to being on the same PW and chatting with people, but in a different area.

2: Ability to use a SQL backend natively. This was sort of grafted in,

I can't believe I had to wade through hundreds of arguments over 3.5 vs 4 and pages of twink guides and batman v. superman like discussion to get to what is the REAL heart of this story. Cryptic Studios and their history of shitting all over the franchises handed them.

Cryptic hasn't gotten it right since City of Heroes, and honestly that was only good by comparison to all the other super hero games of the day (read: none). Quickly it turned into an EXTREMELY drab treadmill. Then once that horse was